Citation rank prediction based on bookmark counts: Exploratory case study of WWW06 papers

New developments in the collaborative and participatory role of Web has emerged new web based fast lane information systems like tagging and bookmarking applications. Same authors have shown elsewhere, that for same papers tags and bookmarks appear and gain volume very quickly in time as compared to citations and also hold good correlation with the citations. Studying the rank prediction models based on these systems gives advantage of gaining quick insight and localizing the highly productive and diffusible knowledge very early in time. This shows that it may be interesting to model the citation rank of a paper within the scope of a conference or journal issue, based on the bookmark counts (i-e count representing how many researchers have shown interest in a publication.) We used linear regression model for predicting citation ranks and compared both predicted citation rank models of bookmark counts and coauthor network counts for the papers of WWW06 conference. The results show that the rank prediction model based on bookmark counts is far better than the one based on coauthor network with mean absolute error for the first limited to the range of 5 and mean absolute error for second model above 18. Along with this we also compared the two bookmark prediction models out of which one was based on total citations rank as a dependent variable and the other was based on the adjusted citation rank. The citation rank was adjusted after subtracting the self and coauthor citations from total citations. The comparison reveals a significant improvement in the model and correlation after adjusting the citation rank. This may be interpreted that the bookmarking mechanisms represents the phenomenon similar to global discovery of a publication. While in the coauthor nets the papers are communicated personally and this communication or selection may not be captured within the bookmarking systems.